Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Microsoft's new operating system, Mojave, was mandated for installation on the new hardware my employer recently purchased for me. Mojave looks an awful lot like Vista was supposed to look like but I heard Vista wasn't doing so well so I understand why Microsoft would want to replace it with Mojave. Anyways, I have decided to document my experiences here.

We installed the "Business" version of Mojave because the "Ultimate" version didn't have something that the "Business" version did have. We also installed the 64 bit version because the 32 bit version was either "a piece of crap" or "sucks donkey balls", I can't remember which. Luckily the hardware vendor provided a disk with all the appropriate drivers although we had to download a couple to get certain features to work. By installing the operating system ourselves we didn't have the 40 gigabytes of pre-loaded bull-feces to uninstall.

The second step was to install all the software we use on a daily, weekly, only-when-we-are-forced-to basis. As a systems administrator and developer I had double the amount of crap to install on the machine but was intelligent enough to download it all ahead of time to a portable drive. There was a lot of "Cancel or Allow" and "Something is attempting to do something" which led to a lot of clicking without reading because after a while you just get numb to it all. I could have been installing some Nazi Al Qaeda kitten snuff porn server hub and not known it because I had become conditioned to clicking these authorizations all the time. The only piece of software that isn't working at this writing is Eclipse. It throws a Java error when it starts up. Fudge.

The first noticeable difference between Mojave and XP is the Windows Sidebar. The sidebar, which by default hovers just above the clock in the explorer bar, features another clock, mini slide-show and news ticker. These things are called gadgets and there are about 400 more of them available ranging from just crap to useful eye-candy. Not wanting to be un-cool, I've loaded as many gadgets as I could into the sidebar. I don't need them but they look snazzy so who cares. I can't wait to have a themed slideshow so I can have some microscopic nudity in the sidebar for when I'm home.

Mojave includes a lot of eye-candy; i.e. things that look really sharp but might not affect your productivity.

I have found a few annoyances. The defragmenter does not show status, it just says this might take minutes or hours. To get around this run the command prompt as administrator then do a "defrag c: -a –v" to defragment drive "C:". I could not figure out how to enable hibernation (I have to create a power plan or something and still couldn't find the option to enable it) so I have to use "sleep" mode or shut down. The initial working set (i.e. just the applications that load at startup) is 1.4 GB. The machine has 4 GB so I will not pass judgment on Mojave being inefficient without looking at the internals. See my other blog posts on memory consumption; i.e. I'd rather have the machine using memory than hitting disk.

I am certain there will be more things to report as I use Mojave but at this time I'm not impressed. Everything I can do on Mojave I can do on Windows XP and even Linux if I so chose.